Design Is Illegible to the Business. Here's What I'd Do About It.

Businesses can see screens, and they can see what engineering ships. They can see far less of the thinking that came before. Peter Merholz calls this design's legibility gap, and I think it explains a lot of conversations designers keep having. Here's how I read his argument and what I'd do with it.

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Peter Merholz published an essay in August called "Design's Legibility Gap". It's been passed around again this month, which is how it reached me. I'll stay with the main thread and the examples he gives, and I'd suggest reading the original yourself.

What "legible" means here

Merholz borrows an idea from James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. In Scott's example, a state looked at a forest and saw timber yield, so it cleared the undergrowth and planted ordered rows. The first generation of trees did well. The second collapsed, because the parts of the forest the state couldn't see had been sustaining it.

His parallel is that what a business can see of design is "screens to be built by engineering". Qualitative research, sketching, ideation and mapping are much harder for an organisation to see, count or plan around. Organisations like predictability because it lets them budget and schedule, predictability depends on knowing in advance what a piece of work will produce, and a lot of design work doesn't work that way.

Three kinds of work that disappear

He gives three examples of design work the business can't see. They're his, and I'd credit them to him.

The first is exploration. If you try four concepts and choose one, the other three vanish, and someone eventually asks why you didn't just start with the one that worked. The second is research that changes a requirement. If the roadmap item keeps its original name, nobody notices that it now describes a different problem. The third is experience principles, which can shape hundreds of decisions without anyone tracing those decisions back to them.

Why I think it matters more now

This next part is my own guess and not something from his essay. As tools make screens cheaper to produce, the visible part of design gets cheaper, and the part where someone decides what's worth building stays as hard as it was. If the business mostly sees screens, it may reasonably conclude that design has become less work, when the invisible part is now a larger share of it.

I could be wrong about how that plays out. But it makes the legibility question more pressing, not less.

What I'd do about it

Merholz's own conclusion is that the real work of design leadership is to evolve what the business sees as legible. He adds that his long-used line, "connect design to what the business values", undersells how much harder that is. I don't have a complete answer to that, but here are three small habits I'd try.

• Write down what you dropped. Next to the design that shipped, keep a short note of what was considered and left out, and why. It turns invisible effort into something a person can read in a minute.
• Name the principle when you present a decision. If a choice follows an experience principle, say which one. Otherwise the principle stays implicit, and nobody can tell it's doing any work.
• Rename the roadmap item when research changes it. If the problem is now different, the label should say so, so that the change is visible to everyone who reads the plan.

None of these will make design fully legible, and I wouldn't claim they will. They do make a little more of the work visible without asking anyone to trust a number that doesn't mean much, like an ROI figure for research.

A check you can run this week

Pick the biggest decision your team made last quarter. Then ask what someone outside the team could tell about it from what exists on paper: what was considered, what was dropped, and what changed along the way.

If the answer is only the final screens, the work happened but nobody can see it. Which decision on your team would you write up first?

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Gytis Markevičius
Product Designer — gytismark.com